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case study 21
Shaping the Path to Digital:
The Indiana University eTexts Initiative
Brad Wheeler and Nik Osborne
Introduction
The rising cost of college textbooks has long been a burden for students,
often motivating them to seek creative ways to get around this expense.
Though digital textbooks—with their ability to provide cheaper, easier, and better
access to content—have been around for years, the use of digital textbooks
for academic purposes is still not widespread.
We are now in an era of great progress for digital textbooks and digital
learning experiences, collectively referred to here as e-texts. Because costs
are the most salient issue, new approaches are needed that work on the root
causes of textbook prices for students. Early 2012 began with three promising
developments:
• First, federal and state governments—along with private philanthropy—
are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in freely available open
educational resources (OER). These resources are being targeted at required,
high-enrollment courses where they can have broad impact for
all types of institutions.
• Second, Apple and other firms are bringing forth new technologies and
business models in a bid to transform the textbook industry.
• Third, some institutions are using their experiences from volume software
buying to change the pricing terms for e-texts in a sustainable
win-win way for students, authors, and publishers.
This case study focuses on the third approach as it went from pilot study
to full implementation at Indiana University (IU) and is now in a trial phase at
five peer institutions.
© 2012 Brad Wheeler and Nik Osborne
This chapter is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License
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